As this time of year approaches, NFL team rosters expand to 90 players which usually leads to an increase in coaching staff, but according to Field Yates of ESPN Boston, the Patriots have the second fewest coaches of any team in the league.

Fewer coaches mean less time to coach players as individuals and will lean towards your typical public school approach of teaching large groups at one time. This philosophy hasn’t proved itself to be the greatest as test scores in public school systems are significantly lower than in private school systems, but this is football not school, right? Well if you are the type that attribute's poor coaching to the Patriots' secondary not improving throughout the year then you might have a problem with how few coaches we have.

This lack of coaching may be because we have the highest paid NFL coach in the league in Bill Belichick who is making 7.5 million dollars per year. This high salary means less to spend on the coaching staff around Belichick, which has been criticized in local sports talk radio as being the reason for having a bunch of nobody’s as secondary coaches.

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Secondary coach Josh Boyer

For whatever you believe, having a smaller coaching staff with one of the youngest teams in football will be a difficult task, but is the task impossible? Smaller groups mean better communication generally. Smaller staffs have more potential of being on the same page than a huge corporation with hundreds of thousands of employees.

The smallest coaching staff belongs to the Pittsburgh Steelers, who have just 15 coaches. It’s hard to make a claim that fewer coaches leads to less wins as these teams have been so consistent for so long. Whether it’s a lack of money or a Belichick philosophy, the Patriots will have to coach up a young team understaffed.